02/13/2015

It's Official: Science Declares We Are In a Rigged Lottery

Across disciplines, we find steep prestige hierarchies, in which only 9 to 14% of faculty are placed at institutions more prestigious than their doctorate... Furthermore, the extracted hierarchies are 19 to 33% stronger than expected from the observed inequality in faculty production rates alone...indicating a specific and significant preference for hiring faculty with prestigious doctorates... Together, these results are broadly consistent with an academic system organized in a classic core-periphery pattern..., in which increased prestige correlates with occupying a more central, better connected, and more influential network position..... A strong core-periphery pattern has profound implications for the free exchange of ideas. Research interests, collaboration networks, and academic norms are often cemented during doctoral training... Thus, the centralized and highly connected positions of higher-prestige institutions enable substantial influence, via doctoral placement, over the research agendas, research communities, and departmental norms throughout a discipline..The close proximity of the core to the entire network implies that ideas originating in the high-prestige core, regardless of their merit, spread more easily throughout the discipline, whereas ideas originating from low-prestige institutions must filter through many more intermediaries. Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, Daniel B. Larremore "Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks" Science Advances [HT Marcus Arvan]

The Clauset (et al.) study covers computer science, business, and history in North America. The best data we have about professional philosophy suggests we're no different in having a prestigious core-periphery dynamics (although, as I noted here and here, with interesting sub-networks that track alternative prestige hierarchies). The study also finds an outcome pattern that suggests bias against women in computer science and business. It is likely that in this respect we're more like these fields than history, alas. It is a bit of a shame the authors did not study fields with long established theoretical cores (physics, chemistry, biology, economics), but, perhaps, we'll see that soon. Their results imply that academic job-markets as well as the circulation and uptake of ideas within the republic of letters are best understood as rigged lotteries.

'Why a lottery?,' you may ask. Well, there is a huge supply of qualified PhDs and an increasingly unequal distribution in the quality (pay, teaching loads, benefits, etc.) and number of jobs. Too many insiders (administrators, state governments, high status academics, grant-bureaucrats etc.) benefit from an ample supply of cheap academic labor. The down-side is born not just by the underemployed and, perhaps, students, but also -- less tangibly -- collegiality and generosity in the academy. Indirectly, society is harmed. It is hard to say what the main causes are why the supply of technological and social innovations has slowed down (start here), but what this study reveals, in part, is that the modern academy and the societies that nourishes it are not giving promising ideas and people a fair chance. This is doubly unfortunate because while some big problems have been solved (e.g., how to organize public health, to provide sanitation, to generate open-ended economic growth, how to organize fairly just socities, etc.), some gigantic ones remain (environment, safe power, war, fanaticism, how to organize financial sector, etc.).

Hypothesis: the prestige-periphery trends are accentuated by the increasing fondness of grant-agencies and universities to pick academic winners. This habit reinforces the huge gap between academic insiders and outsiders. Even if grant-winners are fully deserving, the rewards they get -- yes, that includes me sometimes -- are so big relative to the non-winners that they automatically undermine the levels of equality that is required for collegiality and generosity, which are useful preconditions for risk-taking and an open, inquisitive intellectual environment. The system also undermines inquisitiveness because what gets rewarded is not the unexplored idea (the non-insider person), but trend-following at the top. All of this suggests philosophy as such is also harmed: anybody mention the fashion-driven nature of philosophical 'research' lately?*

* I suspect that the demand for application is another cause of the slowdown in innovation. But about that some other time.

Comments

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I'm not disinclined to believe any of these conclusions. In fact, I think there is fairly broad evidence for them. But to make an argument on the basis of this sort of statistical evidence, you have to take into account not merely differences in faculty quality - I assume that's what they are trying to do with the "observed inequalities in faculty production rates" - but differences in what students go there in the first place. We all have admissions. The best students - well, let's say the students deemed best at admission by a huge number of programs, including those of us who are not in the top tier - overwhelmingly choose these top places for grad school. If there is anything substantive to our admissions procedures, they are getting better grad students. And that would be an explanation for those students getting the best jobs even if the training at the higher ranked school were not better.

Again, not saying that there aren't networks, in-groups, all that. But inferring from "most of the top jobs go to students at the top schools" to such conclusions seems to me to be questionable.

"The best students - well, let's say the students deemed best at admission by a huge number of programs, including those of us who are not in the top tier - overwhelmingly choose these top places for grad school."

I'd say that holds for some students, but not for all. If you're first generation college, or attend an undergrad institution where very few people go on to grad school, you might have no idea about how the game works -- you just apply to places that seem reasonable to you, and that might not include the "top-tier".

My GRE scores were high enough (I maxed what was back then the "Analytic" section) that, along with my GPA, writing sample, etc. I could have been admitted pretty much anywhere I might apply (and I was admitted to every place I did, some with fellowships, others not).

I ended up picking Southern Illinois University Carbondale - where I actually ended up getting a great, but not prestige-conferring graduate education - because they offered me the best fellowship, and their office staff seemed like they knew what they were doing (which was decidedly not the case with some of the other schools). I passed on considerably more prestigious schools on the basis of criteria that, at the time, seemed reasonable enough to me.

I suspect I'm not the only person who took such a path into graduate school

Marc, I think your objection is met in this line: "Under a meritocracy, the observed placement rates would imply that faculty with doctorates from the top 10 units are inherently two to six times more productive than faculty with doctorates from the third 10 units. The magnitude of these differences makes a pure meritocracy seem implausible, suggesting the influence of nonmeritocratic factors like social status."

I do think there is an interesting question about to what degree grad admissions is based on the right sort of criteria.But I am not familiar with good studies of this.

Mark, where is the statistical evidence that the best students overwhelmingly choose "top" tier schools? George raised a good point about this, but in addition, there is just a lot of misinformation around. For example, I believe that you will find test scores and GPAs of students at Stony Brook comparable to those at the so-called top tier schools. And when I was at Penn State--things may have changed since then--the GREs of our students were comparable to those at top tier schools. It was not unusual for us to have students with perfect scores. These students chose these schools becuase they offered an alternative to the kind of education found at "top" tier schools, not because their grades or test scores were lower. And now they will be stigmatized as not as good. There is more than one reason for this, of course, but no doubt the rankings have helped reinforce this and other points that Eric makes. (To back Gregory up here: I was a first generation college grad in my family. I knew that there was a difference between so-called analytic schools and continental ones, but as 22 year old I had no idea of how my decision to go to Boston College--a place that regularly had important European figures like Gadamer, and excellent scholars like Jacques Taminuax, on the faculty, and after I left Habermas--would mark me for life. What I knew was that Boston College was in Boston and so was my girlfriend, with whom I wanted to live. They offered me a sweet deal, and there was a consortium so I could take courses and meet philosophers at schools all around Boston. So what was not to like at the time......at 22.)

P.S. I should note that I believe that GREs have limited predictive value regarding who succeeds in graduate school. Once students have a certain set of skills, other factors are going to kick in. I prefer to rely more on grades, course work, writing samples, and letters. I mentioned the GREs because they are so often offered as evidence for a department having "top" students.

Interesting, and probably (depressingly) right. I haven't read beyond the abstract, but this new study looks at communications and claims that faculty hiring has less to do with quality of doctoral education than networking between individual faculty.